Producer
Gruma
World's largest corn flour and tortilla manufacturer; brands: Maseca, Mission Foods, Guerrero; controls ~70% of Mexico's corn flour market and >50% of US tortilla market; in some Mexican markets, 9 out of 10 kg of tortilla flour is Gruma/Maseca; found to have 'no competitive conditions' by Mexican regulator COFECE in 2024
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Inputs supplied
1
Goods downstream
1
Facilities
0
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1 input Gruma supplies
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Corn Flour / Masa Harina (Maseca Brand)
45%Flatbreads (Mission Foods)
35%Wheat Flour + Seeds
20%
Intelligence
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Did you know2023
GRUMA/Maseca controls approximately 70-75% of Mexican corn flour production and over 50% of US tortilla production — a level of market concentration so extreme that Mexican regulators (COFECE) declared in 2024 that GRUMA had "no competitive conditions" in the Mexican corn flour market, an unusual formal finding. This concentration means that when corn prices rise (as in 2022 when Ukraine war disrupted global corn supply), GRUMA controls the transmission of that price shock into Mexican tortilla prices — a political flashpoint. Mexican tortilla prices are tracked by the government as a key inflation indicator because tortillas are the dietary staple for the bottom half of Mexico's income distribution. When the same company controls 75% of the ingredient AND over 50% of finished product manufacturing, tortilla price inflation in Mexico is effectively determined by one company decision-maker in Monterrey. GRUMA has become embedded in Mexican food security policy in a way that few private companies achieve in any country.
COFECE (Mexico) ↗Origin2023
Roberto Gonzalez Barrera founded Molinos Azteca in Cerralvo, Nuevo Leon, Mexico in 1949 with the specific goal of industrializing nixtamalization — the 3,000-year-old process of cooking corn in alkaline water (cal, calcium hydroxide) that transforms corn into masa for tortillas. Before Maseca, every Mexican household spent 4-6 hours per day grinding nixtamalized corn into masa by hand — an enormous daily labor burden for women. Gonzalez Barrera's masa harina (dehydrated nixtamalized corn flour) reduced tortilla preparation to minutes. By 1974, Maseca had become the dominant masa harina in Mexico. The company renamed itself GRUMA and expanded into the US through Mission Foods (acquired 1977). The key nutritional insight: nixtamalization increases available niacin (vitamin B3) in corn by up to 15-fold and adds calcium from the lime. Populations who ate unixtamalized corn got pellagra (niacin deficiency); Mesoamerican civilizations eating nixtamalized tortillas did not. GRUMA industrialized a process that prevents disease AND feeds a continent.
GRUMA S.A. de C.V. ↗